Women-only bus plan rolling along

MEXICO CITY -- Maria del Carmen Hernandez endures a nearly two-hour bus ride to her job cleaning a law office on the far side of town. Once her labors are done, she has the same slog home.

It's a withering drill, through smog and traffic and the mind-numbing repetition of countless stops and starts. But on this day, at least, Hernandez can rest assured that the rigors of her trip won't include being groped.

The 48-year-old Mexico City commuter is among thousands of women who have begun crisscrossing the city aboard public buses that exclude men.

The women-only bus service, launched in January, is the city's answer to a long-standing complaint among Mexican women that in the sardine-can confines of public buses and subways, some men simply will not keep their hands to themselves.

"It's not normal, but it's frequent," said Hernandez, who said she has experienced unwelcome touching numerous times while riding public transportation. The best protection, she said, is to try to snap up a seat next to the window to avoid contact with (male) riders crowding the aisle.

"They know it's offensive," she said, "but they do what they want to do."

Not on this bus.

Hernandez relaxed in the back, next to the window (habits die hard), as the city bus, distinguished by the pink "Ladies only" sign on the windshield, rumbled past the fountains and shade trees of the majestic Paseo de la Reforma and along grittier stretches as it neared its terminus in a lower middle-class neighborhood called La Villa.

At several stops, men clambered aboard, apparently without having noticed the windshield sign. But they retreated after the driver told them that this bus was for women only; they'd have to wait for a conventional bus to come along.

Among the passengers, there was no gloating or tittering at seeing men turned away, just the quiet satisfaction that this ride was theirs alone.

"At last they do us justice," said Sara Plata, 54, who was headed home from her job in a day-care center.

Plata said the loutish behavior of some male riders on Mexico City's mass transportation system, which includes a sprawling subway, public buses and a network of more than 20,000 privately owned vans known as "micros," wasn't limited to wandering hands.

"They speak in ugly words or they don't give up their seat for senior citizens," she said.

The all-women's bus tends to be less crowded, passengers said, and the atmosphere more polite. During this ride, a middle-age woman rose to offer her seat to an elderly passenger who had boarded.

"We can sit down. On the other one, no," Hernandez observed.

That tranquil air is just what local officials were aiming for when they decided Mexico City would join public-transportation systems in Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Cairo by setting aside spaces exclusively for women.

The all-women service here has expanded since its inauguration in January to include 55 of the city's 1,300 buses, with two dozen more buses on the way. By the end of March, the single-sex buses, which like regular buses cost about 20 cents to ride, will be running on a fourth of the 88 routes.

So far, the buses have carried 400,000 women, said Ariadna Montiel, the bus system's director.

Montiel said the idea came up after passenger surveys confirmed women's dismay over groping a phenomenon with which she was personally familiar from her own commuting experience.

Montiel recalled that as an architecture student during the 1990s, she would decide what to wear based on whether she planned to ride public transportation. Skirts were a bad choice for the crowded quarters of Mexico City's bus or subway, where men might ogle or reach, she said.

"I think every woman has experienced something like this on public transportation at one time or another," she said.

Mexico City's subway designates certain cars for women, children and the elderly, who board along a restricted portion of the platform during peak times. Officials say the practice works well.

But providing segregated seating on buses was impractical, Montiel said, so transportation officials decided to set aside entire buses for women. The buses travel the same routes as coed buses, but less often.

The arrangement has generated grousing from some men among the city's 850,000 daily bus passengers who say the woman-only service is unfair.

"There are some who say it's discrimination," said Victor Luna, 36, who was driving the women's bus the other day. "They say, 'In what article of the Constitution does this appear?' "

But plenty of men in male-dominated Mexican society empathize with women, who make up a fifth of total riders as they have joined the work force in larger numbers.

"Because of the fault of Mexican culture, it's necessary," Andres Meza, 30, said of the women's buses, a few moments after being turned away from one. "Unfortunately, there are a lot of men who behave this way."

But even some of its supporters concede that the service skirts deeper issues that beset relations between the sexes in Mexico.

"They can help by providing a service like this," said Mitzi Hernandez, 27, a customer-service representative who was riding the women's bus for the second time. "But to change a person's mentality? No."